The death toll from car bombs that targeted two prominent hotels in Baghdad a day earlier rose to 15 people, with another 42 wounded, Iraqi officials said Friday, as the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.

While ISIS may not be capable of overrunning Baghdad, it might be able to put the city under a kind of internal siege, as:

The ability of extremists to target heavily secured buildings in the heart of the capital brutally underscored the city's lingering vulnerability. The IS group has been able to carry out regular attacks in and around Baghdad, mainly targeting the security forces and the country's Shiite majority, while battling Iraqi forces on multiple fronts elsewhere in the country.

If the government cannot secure the country’s main city, one thinks, then most likely it cannot, itself, survive. And Iraq will, along with much of the rest of the mid-East, descend still further into chaos.

The ISIS campaign in Iraq proceeds where it cannot be seen and meets little resistance. The U.S. says it has a plan by which government forces will go on the offense and retake lost territory … beginning in a few months.

Yesterday, the Treasury Department designated Ali Musa Daqduq, “a senior Hizballah commander responsible for numerous attacks against Coalition Forces in Iraq, including planning an attack on the Karbala Joint Provincial Coordination Center (JPCC) on January 20, 2007, which resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.”

Criminal charges have been filed against a 22-year old Army private accused of leaking a classified video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a number of civilians to the WikiLeaks Web site.